Garland’s Debut Delight

It’s not often we would in this present day we would go to the cinema’s and watch a film that is essentially a directorial debut. Having written the stories to some of the biggest cult hits, first time director Alex Garland has spent a lot of time with the stylistic Danny Boyle; working on such films as The Beach, 28 Days Later, Sunshine and Kazuo Ishiguro’s book adaptation Never Let Me Go. Now, writing and directing his feature debut, Garland proves that he has been paying attention and taking tips to the films he has been involved with as he tackles a sci-fi thriller aspect that has been seen in various different way’s in the past – Artificial Intelligence.

Featuring Domnhall Gleeson and Oscar Isaac who are both set to star in the new and upcoming Star Wars and Alicia Vikander who herself has 3 films released this month; Ex Machina is quite grand in both the performances of the actors and the Style that Garland has gone for. So the story right from the start introduces us to the character of Caleb (Gleeson), a twenty-four year old Nerdy coder who wins the chance to spend a week at his CEO bosses luxury but remote house. Travelling for many hours over his private estate via helicopter, he arrives at a remote mountain villa Where he meets Nathan (Isaac), a prodigy programmer, who at the young age of thirteen created the foundations of Bluebook (basically the equivalent to Google and Apple combined). Now middle-aged and extremely wealthy from his companies growing success, Nathan  lives a solitary life at his custom-built smart house, which is insulated by intelligent automated features and billionaire gadgets. As soon as we see Caleb relocate this remote location, which turns out to be a research facility, Nathan invites Caleb to be part of the experiment during his one week stay. This experiment that Nathan classes as the greatest discovery of mankind, is to test the world’s first artificial intelligence system, which is housed inside the body of a beautiful robot girl called Ava (Vikander).

The film overall with it’s themes of technology and creating life in the form of artificial intelligence is certainly an interesting case. However before we go into depth about the themes and the stylisation that Garland has gone for, I would like to firstly talk about the performances, specifically Alicia Vikander’s role as Ava who out of only the three main performances we do see, did appeal more to me. it’s very much a physical performance that she has her head and human hands and the rest of the A.I is built in a cyborgy structure which you can literally see right through the artifice of humanity. What I like about what Vikander did was how she used her body expressions, but mostly her facial properties to convey what this sought of character/ A.I would do.

You also have to give credit to the special effects team who conjured up this translucent mechanical body as they must of spent a good deal of time on Ava  judging from the fact that the torso is very detailed in that you can see the insides of the cyborg working which ultimately does look beautiful especially with this blue-ish light that we see coming out of the body, and looks believable when we hear this sought of symphony of whispered gyroscopic sound as she moves. Her performance overall is just a mixture being natural and unnatural and I give my full credit due to the fact that she has got three films out at the moment which just shows the amount of varied work she has done in recent years and months.

For Domnhall Gleeson, the premise of his character is very much similar to that of his character once played in Frank in that he is thrown into a portal of unknown weirdness, and often out of his depth. Over the seven days of testing, Caleb must perform the scientific ‘Turing test’ on Nathan’s AI’ system, nicknamed Ava; the idea of which is to deduce God-like theories and philosophical concepts – do robots feel a consciousness? If disguised, would you know it is a robot? Is it ethical? 

Of course and understandably, this A.I concept has been engaged with before in many various ways. The central idea of it overall within this film however is that one of demonstrations of Artificial Intelligence, of consciousness and of singularity would be attraction. The rules of attraction are very much brought into play in terms of the character Ava who we question while watching, is she thinking? is this machine attracted and attractive? Out of the two, the attracted prospect is the more important for me at least because throughout you do question the Ava’s motives and ponder what she will do by the end of this film. Obviously, these ideas relate back to several films that focus on this A.I idea such as Blade Runner which in that centralises around this theory which wonders whether or not the replicants have souls and can fall in love, Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence in which there is this big discussion right at the start if the film where we see William Hurts mentions how the great challenge is to make a robot that can love and be loved. One film in particular that stands out more to me that answers these questions about Artificial Intelligence being able to love something or loving an entity is Spike Joneze’s Her which follows the character of Theodore, a lonely introverted man, who purchases and bonds with this operating system that calls itself Samantha who progressively learns and grows psychologically and for Theodore, is a constant presence. One of the key themes from Her that is clearly transposed in Ex Machina is this idea that we as people who all of us live in very contemporary and high-tech lives, rely on technological advancement too much and this demand for these ambitious technological ideas could there-after be our doom and end similar to what The Terminator films hint at. Yet, Garlands vision of A.I is in my opinion very independent to some of those films that I have mentioned due to the fact that Ex Machina throughout is stylishly and psychologically mesmerising to witness.

I like the fact that Garland, who is not stranger to the psycho-thriller genre aspect, implements these thriller concepts into a piece of Sci-fi material that has been done over many times in recent years. For me, I like this film’s A.I perspective than some of the films that do focus on Artificial intelligence due to it’s thriller edge. It’s obvious watching Ex Machina that Garland knows how to work around a heavy and questionable Sci-fi idea with the thriller cinematic credentials. Ex Machina is a perfect example of what a good Thriller film should look like. It’s introduction is relatively fast but from then on, it slowly builds up creating this edgy atmosphere which makes you question the different possibilities of how this story will end. There are instances where the camera angles that are used do feel reminiscent of what 28 Day’s Later did in that we are watching a scene that has clearly been filmed in many different angles at the same time which in a way adds to this films surreal feeling. The mixture of sound, whether it’s diegetic or non diegetic, is very well crafted as although we do hear a beautiful piano theme playing methodically, Garland doesn’t hold back when there is a serious moment going on in the film as he does use rather faced-paced but melancholic sounds to really put you off as the viewer which again just clarifies how complex this film can be for the majority of the time.

Compressed into an impressive 1 hour and 48 minutes running time considering the fact that it has to cover a lot of ground for such a serious Sci-fi drama, Ex Machina stylistically is a joy to watch despite it being an edgy off-your seat thriller. The cast of three with Domnall Gleeson, Oscar Isaac and Alicia Vikander who get’s my performance of the film praise, were all well placed within this well thought-out, British piece of work. For me, out of some of the Sci-fi films that cover Artificial Intelligence excessively, Ex Machina is probably one of the important ones to watch due to the fact that Garland expertly mixes the Sci-fi aspects with the Thriller cinematic mechanics which again, makes for a good psychological viewing experience. Alex Garland’s debut films comes highly recommended from me. However, if any of you guys have indeed watched Ex Machina, feel free to write in the comments section down below of you thought of the film and whether or not it ranks highly amongst the other Sci-fi films do focus their attention of A.I.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ – Alex Rabbitte